"The Socialists have always condemned wars between people as barbarous and bestial. Our attitude towards war, however, differs in principle from that of the bourgeois pacifists and Anarchists. We differ from the first in that we understand the inseparable connection between wars on the one hand and class struggles inside a country on the other, we understand the impossibility of eliminating wars without eliminating classes and creating Socialism, and in that we fully recognize the justice, the progressivism and the necessity of civil wars, i.e., wars of an oppressed class against the oppressor, of slaves against the slave-holders, of serfs against the bourgeoisie. We Marxists differ both from pacifists and Anarchists in that we recognize the necessity of an historical study of each war individually, from the point of view of Marx's dialectical materialism."
The difference between a marxist point of view and a pacifist point of view has been blurred on these lists.
Chris Burford
London